Arts & Culture

MARTYRS HAVE IT easy, thinks Cyrus Shams, the 20-something protagonist of Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel. “Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus?” At least they had clarity and purpose, Cyrus reasons.

In Akbar’s Martyr!, Cyrus, a first-generation Iranian immigrant, is an aspiring poet and martyr. His problem, he thinks, is that he doesn’t know what to die for.

Cyrus’ mother Roya was killed when she was a passenger on a jet that was shot down by a U.S. warship (inspired by the real-life downing of Iran Air Flight 655). Her death leaves a gaping wound in the Shams family: Cyrus is haunted by survivor guilt and his father self-medicates with alcohol. Martyr! is in part a meditation on the inherited weight of history and grief.

This burden seems particularly true for immigrants in the U.S. — or anyone who carries the weight of multiple identities. Sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the “double consciousness” of Black Americans, who have historically carried within themselves at minimum two narratives: the American dream as well as the nightmare.

 I REJOICED WHEN the cicadas emerged in spring of this year. My family moved to Georgia 13 years ago, missing the periodical cicadas here by a few months. This year, trillions of cicadas from two different broods emerged across 17 U.S. states. It was the first time since 1803 that those broods’ 17- and 13-year cycles were in sync. Some see them as nuisances or pests. I marvel at them. Before this year, I hadn’t heard the distinct song of Magicicada trecidem, a member of the Great Southern Brood whose droning wail prompted worried citizens in South Carolina to call the police on male cicadas for their lovesick racket. Some days I heard the constant blare as a lament for all the wickedness in the world; other times I took it as a call to prayer. Maybe that is what prayer is: bemoaning the horrors and tuning into a God who cares about everything from nations to Magicicada—and listening to a God who cries with us.

IN THE CLOSING scenes of Marvel’s original Guardians of the Galaxy, we find our heroes in a tight spot. The group — escaped science experiment Rocket Racoon, giant sentient tree Groot, assassin Gamora, ex-convict Drax, and mercenary Peter Quill — have been grudgingly working together to protect a powerful artifact from falling into the wrong hands. Because they’ve each been pursuing their own agendas instead of working together, they are close to failure. It’s up to Quill (Chris Pratt), to convince them to start working as a team.

“I look around at us, and you know what I see?” he asks them. “Losers.” Noting their incredulous faces, Quill qualifies, “I mean, like, folks who have lost stuff.” He’s right; each of these tentative allies have experienced loss, trauma, and unresolved grief that taught them not to trust others.

AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR, known for such roles as Hippolyta Freeman in the HBO series Lovecraft Country and Mama in The Color Purple (2023), approaches her acting as an artisan, searching for the right tools with which to craft her characters, she told Sojourners’ assistant editor Josina Guess this spring. Two recent films — Origin (2023) and Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024) — feature powerful performances by Ellis-Taylor and tap into her own yearning for a world in which justice and truth prevail.

Origin (written, produced, and directed by Ava DuVernay) is a biographical drama inspired by Pulitzer-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s process of writing Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). The film depicts a quest for the origins of why we separate ourselves from one another, even though it destroys us physically, spiritually, and politically. For her moving performance as Wilkerson, Ellis-Taylor traveled to Germany and India, tracing Wilkerson’s observations about the connected histories between Nazism, the caste system, and racism in the United States — deepening our understanding of these bitter human wounds.

Exhibiting Forgiveness is an autobiographical film written and directed by artist Titus Kaphar, whose process-oriented works on canvas, sculpture, and film reveal the layered reality between history and the present. In Exhibiting Forgiveness, an artist named Tarrell experiences rising success while haunted by flashbacks of a childhood riddled with addiction and family violence. Ellis-Taylor plays Joyce, the artist’s mother, who begs her son to forgive because “it’s what the Bible says.”

Both films invite viewers to wrestle with themes of reckoning and healing on a personal and societal level. Ellis-Taylor spoke with Guess about the lessons of Origin in this election year, what she sees as the “burdensome” work of Black forgiveness in the face of ongoing harm, and her commitment to speaking and living into truth, including embracing her queer identity while remaining in the Black church. —The Editors

As I remember it, I was first introduced to Jamie Grace’s career while listening to a Christian radio show in 2011. At the time, she was a 19-year-old college student majoring in child and youth development, recently signed to a major Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) label, and was less than a year away from being nominated for the 2012 Grammy Award for Contemporary Christian Music Song. She was a Black woman in an industry largely made up of white men; she was open about her diagnoses of Tourette syndrome, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder at a time when I wasn’t aware of many people who were; and she was a very skilled guitar player, songwriter, and singer. As such, it seemed obvious that she had a bright future in an industry that needed new energy.

Early in his adult life, Lau-Lavie is outed in a news article as gay, prompting him to move from Israel to New York in search of a spiritual life that makes more sense than his Orthodox heritage.

“ONE OF THE TRADITIONS of St. Patrick is an old prayer that he wrote called ‘St. Patrick’s Breastplate,’” explained Father David Rose of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Rincon, Ga., to the half-dozen men who’d gathered around him. “It’s more like an epic poem, like an old epic Celtic poem, but it’s a prayer.”

“I bind unto myself today / the strong Name of the Trinity,” he continued, reciting stanzas of the 1,500-year-old prayer. “By invocation of the same / The Three in One and One in Three / Of Whom all nature hath creation / Eternal Father, Spirit, Word: Praise to the Lord of my salvation / Salvation is of Christ the Lord!”

Father Rose wasn’t addressing his fellows from the pulpit, however, nor were they gathered in the basement or rectory of St. Luke’s. Instead, he was speaking to a group of Dungeons & Dragons players at Savannah Lion Games in Pooler, Ga., at a table covered in rulebooks and dice rather than Bibles and hymnals.

Welcome to Game Church.

When Girls Govern

The documentary Girls State follows a group of dedicated high school girls as they participate in an immersive mock-government program. At a time when civic norms are being eroded, the film is a fascinating, hopeful, and human portrait of American democracy’s future. Apple TV+

IN PEACEBUILDING AND THE ARTS, practical theologians Theodora Hawksley and Jolyon Mitchell ask readers to imagine peace: “It is all too easy to reach for clichés” — doves or peace signs come to mind — or “to think of peace as a sort of absence, a not-happening.” In our violent world, we readily picture conflict and injustice, but not peace or conflict transformation. The arts help us fill this empty space, revealing the true nature of peacebuilding as “an ongoing, dynamic process, a journey that sets human relationships on the road to life.” Through bolstering the moral imagination, the arts rehumanize dehumanized contexts.

Mitchell explains how the arts give us “realistic visions of how to create peace” and foster “an environment in which the ‘moral imagination’ can be cultivated.” He shares the example of Mozambican Anglican Bishop Dinis Sengulane, who, in the mid-’90s, established the Transforming Arms into Tools project after the end of Mozambique’s long civil war. This project asked local artists to “glorify peace” through refashioning decommissioned weapons into art. Compelling works such as “Throne of Weapons” (2001) and “Tree of Life” (2004) emerged: metallic sculptures made from assault rifles welded together in a way that preserved the outlines of the weapons. The “Throne of Weapons” has a back, arms, seat, and legs made clearly from the barrels, triggers, and heels of AK47s. The viewing experience is a dance between the parts and the whole, which underscores the meaning of the project itself. The sculptures represent the specific horrors of the past and broader hope born from peacebuilding. Displayed in public places in the U.K., these works have served as a caution against gun violence and an inspiration to activist-artists across the globe.